Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Metallurgy Europe -preparing for Energy's Future

Experimenters are having difficulties in replicating Parkhomov's replication of Andrea Rossi’s LENR reactor. Some succeed in generating excess heat, but at the expense and embarrasment of exploding reactors. Construction and metallurgy of reactor tubes and heating coils seems to be part of the problem. Advances in optimizing results may require entirely new alloys. To that end, initiatives of Matallurgy Europe may well provide the solution. See organization's May 27th, 2015 call for specific proposals to advance Europe’s leadership in metallurgical manufacturing.

Metallurgy Europe – EUREKA Clusters

Background:
Metallurgy Europe is a seven-year EUREKA Cluster Programme with the ambition of developing and industrialising the next-generation of metallic materials... The following calls have been approved for official release on 27th May 2015. Large-scale, high-impact, market-driven cluster projects are being solicited in a broad range of metallurgical and manufacturing fields...
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Here are excerpts from four of the 14 proposal calls:

-Call-02 Multi-Component Alloys for Extreme Industrial Applications
Many industrial applications are subjected to extreme operating conditions... due to very high temperatures, high pressures, highly oxidising environments, corrosive and acidic attack, sour gases and steam, severe wear and abrasion, neutron irradiation...
A range of alloys have been successfully developed over the past 50 years, such as nickel-based superalloys, ODS steels, PGM alloys, cobalt-chromium and tungsten alloys. However, these materials are being constantly challenged by designers and engineers, in pursuit of higher performance, reliability and product longevity. One way to improve these materials is to explore the vast opportunities of multi-component alloying, where 5-10 elements are mixed and solidified...
There should also be a strong emphasis on gathering property data such as creep, fatigue, fracture toughness, wear resistance, hardness, oxidation resistance etc... Scaling up the selected alloys from 0.1 kg to >100 kg production is anticipated in order to permit manufacturing and testing of industrial components for e.g. turbomachinery, pumps, nuclear reactors, hard tooling, dies and heat exchangers...

-Call-03 Structural Steels for Non-Ambient Conditions
Advanced steel grades are used throughout the industrialised world for structural applications. While there are many alloy choices for steels at ambient room-temperature (as in the automotive and construction industry), there is a strong industrial need to develop better steels for structural applications involving non-ambient conditions. These needs include both very cold applications such as in cryogenic tanks, as well as in very high temperature applications like in power-generation plants and turbomachinery.
New grades shall be proposed that can be manufactured at the laboratory scale... Mechanical properties such as static tensile, fatigue and fracture toughness should be assessed, as well as creep and oxidation resistance for the high-temperature applications at 600-700°C. Optimal alloy conditions should be defined, also as a function of heat treatment and weldability...
...improved high-temperature steels would make power plants more efficient by several %, resulting in even larger decreases in fuel cost and CO2 emissions

-Call-08 Additive Manufacturing of Large Metallic Structures
To date, additive manufacturing (AM) of metallic materials has been largely focused on small-sized components... However, there is also a strong industrial demand for producing large, single-piece, alloy components in the 1-5 metre range. The industry sectors typically requiring large metallic structures include aeronautics, space, defence, maritime, road transport, construction, as well as turbomachinery and power generation systems.
The project... shall focus on AM techniques, such as wire-fed plasma-arc, blown-powder and hybrid routes, that are capable of manufacturing and machining good-quality large parts...
Alloy chemistries better suited to AM processing, as well as multi-material parts, should also be explored... Furthermore, a strong connection with the X-ray/neutron project (Met-Euro-Call-01-2015-12)...

-Call-09 Combinatorial Alloy Development and Infrastructure
European industry needs to accelerate the discovery of new materials and get them to the market quicker... The project...shall develop and establish a number of integrated combinatorial facilities across Europe, in order to rapidly produce and test large arrays of bulk and thin-film alloy samples. The targeted applications for alloys shall be largely determined by industrial requirements... The alloy classes to be synthesised shall typically include: solid solutions, high-entropy alloys, intermetallics, semiconductors, bulk metallic glasses, composites and other multi-component systems.
...This topic is highly strategic and will serve a large proportion of Europe’s technical sectors, including production, transportation, energy, renewables and healthcare.
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The Eureka clusters involve over 40 European countries, but also includes Israel, South Korea, and Canada.

Addendum:

While call-12 does not connect directly to future energy production, scynrotrons could improve current quality of LENR reactor cores -and ash analysis:

-call-12 X-ray & Neutron Characterisation Serving Metallic & Industrial Applications
... a special call is being announced for the development of a large-scale ‘service-providing’ project dealing with advanced characterisation using synchrotron X-rays and neutrons. Year on year, these tools are becoming more sophisticated and powerful, penetrating deep into the heart of materials. The various beam-lines in Europe are able to provide valuable insight into a material’s crystal structure, multi-phase structure, nano-structure, precipitate distribution, residual stress, as well as a host of other physical properties like magnetism. Many of these properties can now be measured as a function of temperature, pressure, gas atmosphere and time (hence, in-situ studies).
... by delivering relevant experimental data from the various X-ray and neutron beam-lines...
The characterisation techniques of most industrial relevance to Metallurgy Europe include: (i) in-situ neutron residual stress analysis for AM, welding and deformation, (ii) diffraction and in-situ imaging of melt-pool dynamics, solidification and grain texture, (iii) in-situ diffraction and imaging of solid-state transformations and nano-precipitate evolution during heat treatment and thermal cycling, (iv) fast high-throughput characterisation and phase analysis of bulk and thin-film alloy samples, and (v) in-situ micro-tomography during mechanical testing (tensile, compression, creep, fatigue) and hipping, also at high temperature and under controlled atmospheres.
... Beam-time and support will be provided, in exchange for industrial fees charged to those projects being directly served.

Up Date

Take a squint at what's coming round the bend in Sweden:

After a slow start, a technique that promises deep sample penetration and improved spatial resolution is catching on fast.

Sweden’s new national synchrotron light source, the MAX IV in Lund, is blazing the trail to produce the brightest x rays yet from a storage
ring. The record brightness, achieved by shrinking the emittance—the product of beam size and angular divergence—of the source electrons,is thanks largely to multibend achromats (MBAs).

Today’s synchrotrons use groups of magnets, typically two or three dipole bending magnets plus focusing and correction magnets, to send electrons around a circular storage ring. The trick with MBAs is to use more bending magnets per group, or achromat. More focusing magnets can then be interspersed between bending magnets, which makes it easier to return wayward electrons to the fold. The resulting x-ray beam is smaller, brighter, and more coherent...

Read the rest of Physcistoday article:
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/68/6/10.1063/PT.3.2810




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